Hard Drive Life Expectancy

Why hard drives fail, and how to extend their life expectancy, including a range of free utilities for HDD care.

Links to the utilities shown in the video are as follows. I have no connection to any of the involved organizations.

WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows (also SMART utility):

Open Hardware Monitor (for monitoring temperatures):

CrystalDiskInfo (SMART utility):

HD Tune (SMART utility):

Hard Disk Sentinel (SMART utility):

DiskFresh (data fade prevention):

[ItsKapow]

Interesting story. I bought a hard drive from a garage sale, as I was about to wipe it I found over 4000 photos of this guy in his college days, photos like college parties, holidays, friends etc all dating back to 2003, also a copy of an old Counter Strike game. Interesting enough, I was surprised all the files were there and not corrupted from being turned on for the first time since the last file was written in 2004.

I tracked down the guy and found out he lives in another state, currently in the process of reuniting him with the hard drive he has lost for over 15 years!

[LazerLord]

It always amazes me how complex and sensitive hard drives are whilst not failing all the time.

[pedroprobst]

HDD failure is one of my greatest fears.

[frankligas]

Thanks for the video. Dell had a 50% dead-on-arrival rate for computers shipped to their customers in their early years.
(Note: I edited and reworded this post without extreme sleep deprivation choosing my words for me.)
The problem was largely due to a single cause, hard drive failures. Something had to be done. Dell invented a new term, the "hard drive touch".
What a hard drive touch referred to was any time a computer hard drive was picked up, moved, vibrated, dropped, tossed, or bounced.
Some of these words sound... crazy. Tossed? Why would hard drives be "tossed"?
Keep in mind how Dell started. Dell helped pioneer the idea that computers could be manufactured to order, per the customer's specification. Then, the computers were only available via delivery, through the mail. During shipping and handling, Yes; often computers were dropped, tossed, or bounced
Dell started at the hard drive manufactures and followed the hard drives all the way to final delivery counting the number of "touches" along the way.
The total number of "touches" had to be greatly reduced. Conveyor belts, factories, fork lifts, and just about everything else in the supply chain all had to be redesigned.
This was very expensive, but it paid off. Dramatically improved, dead-on-arrival statistics proved it.
There was quite some delay, but it was Dell's investigations that lead a consortium of hard drive manufactures to add a new feature to all disk operated hard drives, "parked heads".
One of the worst things that can happen to a drive, is that the read/write heads can bang into the disk's surface, damaging the read/write heads, and the data they are attempting to read.
"parked heads" was a concept that when the drive is not reading or writing, the read/write heads should be safely parked off to the side, away from the disk's surface.
This allowed for drives to be much more damage resilient.
Hope this helps.

If you enjoyed this comment, please do me two favors. One: click the like button on Chris's video above, and Two: Tune into my video comments 30 years from now, when I share a wonderful tale of how a little YouTube channel called Explaining Computers helped change the world for the better. : )

Again, thanks for the video.

[rweaver]

The last minute of the video is actually the most important of this wonderful video. There are reasons for early HDD failure, but if you avoid harsh treatment, hard drives are spectacularly reliable and long lived. I fished a 100GB 2.5 inch IDE out of a dead laptop that had been resting untouched in my garage for ten years and recovered every byte on it. Probably 40 GB of actual data. I simply don't shake or bake my drives and they simply keep on humming along inaudibly.

HDD's are also spectacularly inexpensive. Jewels for a pittance. Unbelievable what you can get for fifty bucks.

You can keep your modern SSD, with built-in failure in a couple of years, and I'll keep enjoying my backward, care-free existence.

I could be wrong, but I would hazard the guess that consumer computing is unprepared for the massive wave of data loss to come, as immature back-up practices collide with SSD end of life in a couple of years. Looking for someone out there to correct me.

[logicalfundy]

I built my own desktop - and yeah, HDD temperature is a bigger deal than most people think. Overheating drives does happen. If you build your own system, make sure the drives can be properly ventilated. Even if your system is pre-built, make sure to regularly clear out the dust from the drives as well as the other components.

[succuvamp_anna]

There are two kinds of Hard Drives in the world.
Drives that have failed and Drives that have not yet failed.

[LazerLord]

Gotta love the way my laptop uses an SSD and hard drive. If the HDD isn't being used, it won't spin it up at all, thus greatly reducing the run-time of the drive in my computer. It's currently sitting at 29C.

[dr.anthonyforgione]

The only apparent omission
in this excellent video is to introduce and define MTBF-
Mean Time Before Failure.

I find your work,
positively outstanding.

[bainsonic]

The head is not moved by a servomotor. What moves the head is the Lorentz force. This works by applying a small current to a coil in a magnetic field thus moving the head left to right way quicker and more precise than a servomotor could.

[JOOLZNED]

My 20 meg hard drive that I bought in the 1990's finally failed last year, I recon thats pretty good going

[sodiumvapor]

Excellent vid. One thing I've personally noticed is how much longer HDDs can store data long term. I retrieved files off an old IDE-type HDD that were over 20 years old! In comparison, I've had flash devices have their data get corrupted after around 5 years.

[syedkarimrayhan]

There is two type of hard drive failure.
1.Seagate
2.Non Seagate

[ErnestJay]

It's a blessing when SMART tells you that your hdd will gonna fail soon because you can backup your important data.

Many hard-drive sometime just "suddenly dead" even though SMART monitoring software like crystal disk info or HD Sentinel tell us that hard drive are fine or 100% healthy.

[ricky_pigeon]

One thing that never seems to get mentioned is if your hard drive is starting up in a cold place. like if you have it on a concrete floor. it can seriously damage the hard drive if its starting up cold. that same goes for sudden temperature changes if you open a window in winter, that will kill your fans too.

[AFCAWorldBodybuildingArchive]

My HDD from 2006 still works like a badass 💪

[marcseen]

Hi Chris! My fave HDDs are WD and I use Data Lifeguard Diagnostics! I also like HGST. My fave drives were Samsung, before Seagate bought them out. I have two 500 GB Samsung HDDs with around 12, 000 hours on them (around 10 years old). 100% perfect. I use Crystal Disk Info and display HDD temps on the taskbar. On data fade, I have Betamax home video movie tapes from 1984 still perfect! Great videi as always! 👍

[AjayGupta-xjcv]

my main 500gb hard disk failed after almost 4 years . i lost incredibly valuable data . the issue was with the read head . either the servo motor or the whole head assembly was broken. i learned my lesson the hard way . please guys always backup your data

[billy]

That scratching sound of the drive's head is better with headphones on :)

[AnttiNannimus]

Well done, Dr. Barnatt! This new video of yours is incredibly concise, accurate, clear, practical, and enormously useful and valuable to those of us who use computers. I suppose we number more than a few these days. It comports exactly with what I've learned and consider important about disk drives after more than 44 years of experience with using different varieties of them. When I started, they were the size of automatic laundry-washing machines, and stored a few megabytes for thousands of dollars each. I was critical of your content last week, so I owe you high praise for a job well-done this time! Thank you, sir, and thank you for the valuable links as well.